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The Lynchburg regional area is well known in the commonwealth and nationally as an area of exceptional collaboration. The new XLR8 STEM Academy exemplifies this tradition reaching across school divisions, technical industry leaders, workforce and economic development entities, and higher education to bring together an innovative opportunity for area students. Collaboration was always known to be the cornerstone of the STEM Academy from the inception of the concept over a year ago. The planning committee understood that beginning a new program under the current economic climate would be extremely challenging. School divisions and localities have been faced with some of the most difficult budget decisions in decades. The decision to push forward with the concept came from a great need vocalized from the private sector for a technically skilled workforce. Elizabeth Narehood, Managing Director of the Future Focus Foundation stated, “Not only is there a present need for a technically skilled workers, but the forecasts show an even more ominous workforce picture for industry.” School division superintendents and CVCC embraced the STEM Academy as an opportunity to offer local students coursework relevant to future careers and provide a jump-start to occupational aspirations through industry certifications and dual enrollment opportunities. Click headline to read more--
"Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of the conditions of men — the balance wheel of the social machinery." - Horace Mann, pioneering American educator, 1848 "In America, education is still the great equalizer." - Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, 2011 When Puritan settlers established America's first public school here in 1635, they planted the seed of a national ideal: that education should serve as the country's "great equalizer." Americans came to believe over time that education could ensure that all children of any class had a shot at success. And if any state should be able to make that belief a reality, it was Massachusetts. The Bay State is home to America's oldest school, Boston Latin, and its oldest college, Harvard. It was the first state to appoint an education secretary, Horace Mann, who penned the "equalizer" motto in 1848. Today, Massachusetts has the country's greatest concentration of elite private colleges, and its students place first in nationwide Department of Education rankings. Yet over the past 20 years, America's best-educated state also has experienced the country's second-biggest increase in income inequality, according to a Reuters analysis of U.S. Census data. As the gap between rich and poor widens in the world's richest nation, America's best-educated state is among those leading the way. Click headline to read more--
If sticking drawings to a fridge won’t do, parents of pint-sized Picassos can put their child’s art on a pedestal by having it 3-D printed through a new service called CrayonCreatures. The service is the invention of Bernat Cuni, a Spanish designer working in Barcelona with a focus on emerging 3-D printing applications. “The idea came one morning when my daughter asked me to make one of her drawings as a toy with my DIY 3-D printer, and I did it,” says Cuni. “She was totally satisfied with a monochrome plastic version of her drawing, but I wasn’t. I felt that something was lost in the translation from drawing to thing. That was the color, the scratches of crayon that make a child’s drawing so unique and expressiveness were lost.” Cuni revised the process to add full-color printouts, and in turn, launched CrayonCreatures to help others do the same. The system is simple: The drawings of a diminutive Degas are scanned, interpreted by an artist at CrayonCreatures, and a full-color print is produced on a ZCorp 3-D printer, then shipped to the designer. It’s similar to Child’s Own, the drawing-to-plushie service, but uses the actual drawn details from the original artwork in the prints. Click headline to read more--
After controlling small satellites in the International Space Station on Friday morning, two teams of high school students took home top prizes for their programming skills. The teams were part of the Zero Robotics SPHERES Challenge, an annual competition that asks students to program bowling ball-size satellites to perform maneuvers related to current space-exploration problems. This year's competitors had to mimic cleaning up broken satellites and other unwanted debris humans have put into orbit around the Earth, but haven't brought back down again. Such "space junk" increases every year, which is a problem for new satellites that people want to put into space. The student-written programs run in real testing satellites, called Synchronized Position Hold, Engage, Reorient Experimental Satellites, or SPHERES, that zip around the cabin of the International Space Station. Click headline to read more--
As a follow-up to their study on how professors view online learning, Inside Higher Ed partnered with Babson Survey Research Group to explore how college professors and administrators interact with technology. The survey, summarized in Digital Faculty: Professors, Teaching and Technology, posed questions about digital learning content, e-books, social media, communication, learning management software and a variety of other technology-related issues. Here are a few key points from this excellent report. Click headline to read more--
iPad has made such a radical change in education with more and more school districts adopting it as a learning tool inside the classroom. Educational Technology and Mobile Learning has been helping teachers all along the way with reviews and tutorials on how to get started using iPad in education. We have reviewed more than 500 apps and we are planning to do more reviews this year.
Having accumulated a modest experience in dealing with educational iPad apps, we deem it important that we share with you some of the learning goals you should keep in mind when using iPad with your students. We have particularly associated sets of educational iPad apps with each learning goal to make it easier for you to achieve the targeted goal.
Check the learning goals below and share with us your feedback. Enjoy Click headline to access the hot links--
A group of consumer panelists shared their candid thoughts on online privacy during a tell-all panel discussion on Generation Y and digital media at CES. Six extremely articulate young adults ages 18 to 28 fielded questions from moderator Xavier Kochhar and the audience about their social media preferences and attitudes. On the topic of privacy, Darius, a 22-year-old fashion designer who uses Twitter "for therapy" summed up the group's attitude with this statement: "We live in public." Darius was keenly aware that everything he shares on Twitter or other social media platforms is "out there," which has made him extremely conscious about what he posts. "I would expect people to be more conscious," he said. The other panelists shared Darius' view and discussed the ways in which they went about keeping their content private. Jordan, a 20-year-old student and environmentalist, said she changed her Facebook settings specifically because of how the social network handles tagging. "I have to filter myself," she said, explaining that she was concerned that some photos or check-ins she was tagged in on Facebook would send the wrong message to employers and colleagues. Click headline to read more--
Today we updated the Wayback Machine with much more data and some code improvements. Now we cover from late 1996 to December 9, 2012 so you can surf the web as it was up until a month ago. Also, we have gone from having 150,000,000,000 URLs to having 240,000,000,000 URLs, a total of about 5 petabytes of data. (Want a humorous description of a petabyte? start at 28:55) This database is queried over 1,000 times a second by over 500,000 people a day helping make archive.org the 250th most popular website. Over the past year we archived tons of pages about the United States 2012 presidential election. You can revisit the New York Times live coverage page from election day, the campaign sites of Republican hopefuls like Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, and mini-scandals like Romney’s car elevator or using aspirin as contraceptives. The Wayback record of the 2008 election was recently used by the Sunlight Foundation to contrast how Obama’s team dealt with disclosing inauguration donors then vs. now, so hopefully the 2012 election content will prove just as useful in the future. Click headline to read more--
The Boston Cyberarts Gallery is pleased to present City of Work, by Michael Lewy. This dystopian view of a city filled with cubicles reflects the ideas of the author of The Overworked American, Juliet Schor, who wrote that in 1990, Americans worked an average of nearly one month more per year than in 1970. Using photography, video, computer graphics and the Internet, Lewy has constructed an entire society where vacations are given by lottery, jobs are determined by the Human Potential Institute and it is illegal to be unemployed. Marcus Sterling L'amour, founder and CEO of Omnipresent Industries says about the exhibition, "While we at Omnipresent Industries disapprove of art, as it represents a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves better workers, this exhibition does reflect the strong values that Omnipresent Industries stands for, our core principles that guide our decisions and actions, ensuring everything we do is beneficial to our way of life. Remember our motto "if you worked here, you would be at work right now."" This exhibition will include a computer based introductory orientation about your new work environment, an opportunity to take a Human Potential Institute test and find out exactly what job you will be assigned to and further inspirational quotes of Marcus Sterling L'amour. Click headline to read more--
There are several reasons why you, as a teacher and educator, should be using Twitter. First , it is free , easy to use and have a user friendly interface which allows you to keep updated of the latest about whoever you are following. Second, Twitter is heavily populated by educators and there is probably no other online social networking platform where you can find such a huge conglomeration of educators and teachers in one single platform as is the case in Twitter. Chances are, as Twitter user , you will definitely meet and make
acquaintances with other fellow teachers from all around the world. This will help you exchange learning and teaching experiences with them, expand your knowledge base and , above all, grow professionally. Click headline to read more--
The U.S. is suffering from a shortage of applicants in the science, technology, engineering and math fields -- or STEM. This is especially true for non-Asian minorities and low-income students, who are statistically less likely to be exposed to STEM professionals, have access to STEM education and hold STEM jobs. According to a recent study by Change the Equation, a non-profit initiative to improve STEM education in the United States, there are two job openings for every unemployed STEM professional. A 2011 reportfrom the Department of Commerce projects that STEM jobs will grow by 17 percent by 2018, compared to 9.8 percent for non-STEM occupations. The achievement gap between low-income and high-income students has been a persistent problem in American public education system. The problem is exacerbated as technology becomes more integral to 21st century professions, and urban American schools struggle to prepare students for this new job market. But an urban public school in Washington, D.C., is trying to change all that. McKinley Technology High School is a Title I STEM magnet school. Title I schools are schools in low-income areas where at least 40 percent of students qualified for a federally subsidized lunch. Click headline to read more and watch video segment--
I have a very different vision of what public schools should be doing than Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee, Jeb Bush, Arne Duncan, Michael Bloomberg and the current generation of “School Reformers.” My vision involves making schools centers of community revitalization where young people’s curiosity and creativity is nurtured, where student differences are recognized and respected, where the physical and emotional health of children is promoted, where teachers have long careers, and where parents and community members are welcome. I think you begin with creating a child-friendly environment. That means sharply reducing the number of tests, leaving ample room for exercise and play, giving primacy to the arts, and having instructions in subject areas, when possible, incorporate hands-on learning and project based activity. I would also like as many schools as possible to grow and prepare food (with indoor and outdoor farms) and link that to science instruction; have students participate in community improvement initiatives, have students use computers they can carry with them rather than forcing them to use them at desks and become involved in mentoring younger students. As much as possible, I would like learning to be cooperative rather than competitive and extend that to the teaching staff – a process that would mean removing the threat of school closings and having evaluation done by peers using multiple measures rather than consultants deriving their data from student test scores. Click headline to read more--
When I was in elementary school I was very annoyed by all this studying. But my idea and hope was that once I was done with school, I would also be done learning. I couldn’t wait. Thus I was rather irritated when I heard that my dad had to complete training for his job to learn new things. I remember I asked him when one would be done learning and the essence of what he said was of course never. Bummer! Some 20 years later I’m still a student and I know I’ll never get done learning. So hang in there and enjoy it! Here are my favorite websites for students. Click headline to access resources--
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The State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) has created an online repository of information on state policies and practices with the goal of providing actional information to state leaders leading school reform and improvement efforts. The State Education Policy Center (SEPC) can be accessed at http://sepc.setda.org/ and contains information on three primary policy and practice areas: K-12 broadband, online student assessment (formative and summative), and instructional materials (with an emphasis on digital and open content). The website also includes general state demographics information and details about state education technology organizations. This project, funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is a valuable resoure for state leaders as they continue to focus on the effective implementation of technology resources in their state. SETDA and its members will continue to add policy updates as they occur, improving the coverage of state-level technology policy and practice over time. In addition to SEPC, SETDA's website also contains a number of reports and research covering state and federal policy and funding issues. Click headline to access the monthly archive of documents--
Opponents of the nation's relentless push for standardized testing in public schools have new champions in Seattle this week as teachers at one high school and now another have refused to issue such exams to their students, calling them a waste of "time and money" amid "dwindling school resources." The entire teaching faculty at Garfield High School (with only three abstentions) voted to support a boycott against administering the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) this week or ever again. Garfield is the largest of thirteen high schools in the Seattle Public School (SPS) system. In a press release, Kris McBride, Garfield’s academic dean and testing coordinator, said the test “produces specious results, and wreaks havoc on limited school resources” during the weeks the test is administered. Click headline to read more--
A fluid marketplace for workers with ever-evolving skillsets has begun to emerge. This change has come about as a result of the rise of free educational tools that allow workers to keep up to date with the newest programming languages, collaborative ways of working that position people as both teacher and student, and intelligent systems that display significant accuracy and insight when matching up workers and employers on potential projects. Click headline to read more--
Fashion Retail Academy has upgraded its wireless internet network in order to meet the demands of the increasing number of students who want to access online learning from their handsets or computers. The new wifi system is able to support around 1,000 web-connected devices at any one time, which means the London-based institution's 700 pupils can access its digital services via their smartphones, tablets or laptops. Networks First - the specialist used to converge the infrastructure - undertook a site survey assessing the various signal and access points around the college in order to design an optimum network for students and the firm is also currently monitoring the system as a managed service. Brendan Kearney, senior manager of IT systems and e-learning at the academy, said the updated platform provides young people with the ability to access the college's online learning materials using their own network credentials to authenticate the connection, which takes the pressure off the IT helpdesk and improves accessibility. Click headline to read more--
The last several years have seen an explosion in mobile applications. By the end of 2013, both Android’s Google Play and the Apple iOS App Store will be hosting a million apps - and we have only seen minor signs of slowing growth. Where the heck are all these apps coming from? Thousands upon thousands of developers are working hard to pump out games, social networks, utility and productivity apps, news readers… if you can dream it, someone is building an app for it. So, how much time and effort is going into feeding this beast? Exactly how long does it take to build a quality native mobile app (not a mobile Web, HTML5 app)? Boston-based Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) mobile-cloud-platform vendor Kinvey set out to answer just that question. Click headline to read more and view infographic--
Within the wide expanse of social networking, educators appear to be gravitating to more protected and exclusive spaces. While teachers often use such popular mainstream social networks as Facebook, they are more likely to seek out and return to less-established networks that offer the privacy, peer-to-peer connections, and resource sharing that meets their specific professional needs, according to a recent survey and interviews with educators. "A lot of teachers are on Facebook as general-population consumers," said Jessie Arora, the founder of Teacher Square, an organization that helps teachers share information around educational technology. "[But] they aren't on Facebook with their teacher hats on." Educators' use of popular networks like Facebook and Twitter has increased overall, but those sites are often blocked in schools and fraught with ethical concerns because so many students use them. As a result, educators—with their particular schedules and Internet habits—are moving toward social networks designed specifically for them, according to data from a survey conducted by MMS Education, a marketing company based in Newtown, Pa. Click headline to read more--
Tiffany Shlain was honored by Newsweek as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century,” She is a filmmaker, founder of the Webby Awards, and co-founder of The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Her last four films premiered at Sundance, including her 2011 feature documentary, Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology, which was selected by the US State Department as one of the films to represent America around the world for The 2012 American Film Showcase. Tiffany Shlain stopped by Filmmaking Stuff to share ideas on marketing, distribution and Cloud Filmmaking. Click headline to read the interview--
The internet only became commercialized in 1995, but its genesis goes back to the late 1960s, more precisely October 29, 1969. That was the date when Robert William Tayor, a former NASA researcher working for the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), launched the ARPAnet operational network, which is recognized as the precursor to what became the internet. ARPAnet provides the starting point for visitors to the recently launched The Big Internet Museum, a virtual venue for all things great and downright silly about the internet. The museum is presented as a slideshow and moves over a timeline that covers 1969 to 2012. At the time of writing this article the tour ended with South Korean superstar Psy’s Gangnam Style, which has notched over one billion views on YouTube. Between ARPAnet and K-pop madness are AOL, MSN, LOLCats and many other internet icons, some of which already look positively vintage now. Some pieces are likely to give visitors a warm feeling of nostalgia, such as the page about Geocities, which colorfully ruled the Web-hosting arena in the late 90s. The online museum project was devised by Dutch advertising professionals Dani Polak, Joep Drummen and Joeri Bakker. MediaMonks, a leading digital production agency in The Netherlands, chipped in with the technology and a mobile version of the museum is currently in development. Click headline to read more--
An archive of the meanings and origins of thousands of phrases, sayings, idioms and expressions. Click headline to access these phrase finding resources--
On the technology side, the answer of what districts will have to do in five years is still elusive, but leaders still have to prepare. “It’s hard for everyone to stay ahead of the curve. In this complex role that leaders serve in schools, how do you get technology on the front burner?” says Brian Lewis, CEO of the International Society of Technology in Education (ISTE). “How do we tap into technology for learning? What are we going to have to do in five years? We don’t know, and yet somehow we have to equip and support our leaders to address that issue.” In many ways, the K12 world is playing catch-up with the business community and other sectors of the economy in maximizing technology’s advantages, says Gene Carter, executive director and CEO of ASCD, formerly the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. And students are expecting the same technology experience in school, Carter says. “One of the big criticisms of many schools is that they are not authentic learning institutions because what happens outside the schoolhouse differs significantly from what students are exposed to,” he says. Greg Limperis, who has a personal learning network called Technology Integration in Education, senses that same gap between K12 leaders and those in other fields. He’s started a LinkedIn group called Technology Integration in Education that built membership slowly but has exploded this year, he says. “There’s no talk of technology and how do we use it,” he says. “There needs to be a real focus on that. We talk all the time about teachers needing professional development. When you look at how administrators are, it’s kind of scary—they’re senior-level, close to retirement, they didn’t grow up with technology, they don’t know how to use it, they don’t appreciate the power of it.” Echoing Carter’s comments, he adds, “How can we keep these kids engaged? You give them the things they’re used to using.” Click headline to read more--
Years ago, when our foundation was getting started and Bill and I were starting to learn more about high school education, I had a conversation with a young teacher in Houston, Texas that transformed the way I look at the work we’re doing. He said that when he reflected about what it meant to be a good teacher, he realized that he had to live the values he was trying to instill in the students. (This reminded me of one of my favorite quotations from Gandhi—that you should “be the change you wish to see in the world.”) Then he said that once he reflected on what it meant to live good values, he stopped thinking just about being a better teacher and started thinking about being a better human being. This teacher gave me a new reverence for what the bond between teacher and student is all about. There is a cliché about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The whole of education is greater than the sum of algebra, persuasive writing, and reading comprehension—even though basic arithmetic tells you that the sum of those parts is very large. That was the idea behind this video, which I just showed a group of hundreds of educators gathered together from 32 districts and states to learn from each other about designing high quality teacher development and evaluation systems. Click headline to read more and watch video--
As a public service, I like to periodically check in on the number of self-proclaimed social media "gurus," "ninjas," "masters" and "mavens" on Twitter. Why? Well, it seems like an important metric, an indicator of something. Whatever it means, this is one indicator that is most definitely on the rise. In January 2013, the number of Twitter users with "social media" as part of their bio has grown to epic proportions. The list now tops 181,000 – up from a mere 16,000 when we first started tracking them in 2009, according to FollowerWonk. Today, there are even 174 people who describe themselves as "social media whores" in their Twitter bios. (We couldn't make that sort of thing up.) Twitter bios allow a mere 140 characters, plus a URL. Therefore, one most boil one's bio down to what one thinks represents one's most essential facts. While a great many of these self-appointed gurus are no doubt taking the title with tongue firmly planted in cheek, the fact remains: a guru is something someone else calls you, not something you call yourself. Click headline to read more and watch video clip--
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